#long live the palestinian revolution

[her-moth]

from Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza, a short film by Abu Ali Mustafa, 1973

[down-the-rabbith0le]

[chaiaurchaandni]

white american liberals love seeing poc as victims who constantly have to beg for a shred of white liberals' attention so they may throw some solidarity our way. the moment we refuse to audition for their sympathy and instead empower ourselves to fight back directly against our oppressors, these same liberals are not so comfortable with the idea of us as victims or innocents - how dare we resist or have our own agency? if a poc takes up a rifle after seeing their entire family be killed, and then is bombed by the killers for fighting back against the killers, then is that poc a victim? oh but how could they be? - they had a gun. the gun becomes our symbol of liberation and hope, not mindless vengeance, but as a means for the destruction of the power structures that our oppressor rests on. stop prefacing your support of poc with condemnations of our resistance. negotiations will never free oppressed people because our oppressors do not have a conscience. you cannot reason with somebody who thinks you are inherently worth less. resistance is the only way forward.

remember that the violence of the oppressed is in no way morally equivalent to the violence of the oppressor. and the oppressed do not have to justify the means of our resistance to the oppressors / the sympathizers of the oppressors.

[phoenyx-rising]

Its bs like this that leads to inaction/ our politics going right. If you actually think this, please educate yourself on history and how politics in this country work, and stop spreading hopeless rhetoric. Some of us arent ready to surrender yet

screaming "we can push them Left!" when all the while they've been pushing you Right.

[beatrix-morrigan]

Open Letter to My Computer Science Students In the Wake of the Temporary Restraining Order

A TA at UCSD reflects on the unprecedented temporary restraining order granted against UAW 4811 's spring 2024 strike, and how CS is fueling modern genocide.

https://beatrix-morrigan.github.io/writing/in-the-wake-of-the-TRO.html

[violottie]

"No sugarcoating the Palestinian cause to make it palatable for Westerners. We don’t want peace—we want freedom. We don’t want to live side-by-side, we want the settlers to leave our land. There’s no conversation to be had. The demand is clear—we want to return to our home. We don’t negotiate with terror!sts. Long live the Palestinian revolution. ✌🏼🔻🇵🇸"

from sbeih.jpg, 01/Apr/2024:

[etz-ashashiyot]

I know I'm gonna regret posting this, but I just can't not say something: I'm so sick of people who are actively contributing to the ongoing oppression of and violence against Palestinians calling themselves "pro-Palestinian."

In the same way that so many people in the anti-abortion movement are actually pro forced birth rather than pro-child, there are a lot of you who aren't pro-Palestinian, you're just violently antisemitic or in it for yourselves.

If you aren't:

Also angry with the other countries that abuse their Palestinian populations, refuse them citizenship, keep them in displaced person camps under horrific conditions, and/or close their borders entirely to them;

In support of genuine grassroots movements that aim to create some kind of stability, peace, and safety through diplomatic relationships and community building, because that's ""normalization"";

Willing to condemn antisemitism in the diaspora, which helps fuels right-wing rhetoric in Israel;

Willing to shut down lies, propaganda, and disinformation even if it "supports" Palestinians in theory, because lying repeatedly associates the Palestinian movement with lying and makes it harder for survivors to tell their actual stories and be believed outside of the far left movements (and also the truth is bad enough - there's no need to lie);

Willing to focus on practical problem solving over political posturing, especially when it will save Palestinian lives;

Willing to condemn Hamas, which started this most recent disaster, steals aid meant for civilians, uses civilians as human shields, and has been torturing dissenters for years;

Willing to work with Israeli leftists who hate their current government and want peace and full equality for Arab Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors, and also have the best shot at making that change happen; and/or,

Willing to learn about Palestinians as living human beings and value their lives over using them as a political cudgel, whatever that looks like on the ground;

.............then maybe you're more interested in looking radical and jerking off to some fantastical version of The Revolution, and/or hurting Jews than you are in promoting peace, safety, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians.

Like seriously with "friends" like these, do they even need enemies??

Anyway you should call out the Israeli government for its very real abuses of Palestinians and nothing in this post should be construed otherwise. But if you genuinely care and aren't just in it for internet cool points or leftist cred or feeding your Jew-hate boner or whatever, you gotta prioritize solutions that have a realistic shot at short-term relief and long-term possibility over whatever fits some idealistic goal that will only ever end with more dead Palestinians.

[mariacallous]

The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could Western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics?

No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the peoples of the world to accept “the sovereignty of Islam” or face “carnage, displacement and terror” if they refuse.  You cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men. An American left, which includes in its ranks the Queers for Palestine campaign group, cannot seriously endorse lethal homophobia in its own country.  They will turn a blind eye in Palestine, as we shall see, but not in New York or Chicago.

Finally, no left organisation proudly honours the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fascist tradition that Hamas embraces with such sinister gusto, although in a sign of a decay that has been building on the left for more than a generation, many will promulgate left-wing conspiracy theories which are as insane as their fascist counterparts.

No, the problem with the global left is that it is not serious about politics. It “fellow travels” with radical Islam rather than supports it. The concept of “fellow travelling,” with its suggestions of tourism, dilettantism, and privilege, is well worth reviving. The phrase comes from the Bolsheviks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 they looked with appreciation on Westerners who supported them without ever endorsing communism. Artists, writers, and academics who were disgusted with the West, often for good reason, I should add, were quite happy to justify Soviet communism and cover up its crimes without ever becoming communists themselves.

Leon Trotsky put it best when he said of fellow travellers that the question was always “how far would they go”? As long as they did not have live under the control of communists in the 1920s or the control of Islamists in the 2020s, the answer appears to be: a very long way indeed

W.H. Auden said, as he looked back with some contempt on his fellow travelling past, if Britain or the United States or any country he and his friends knew were taken over by a “successful communist revolution with the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc., we would have screamed our heads off”. But as communism happened in backward Russia “a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment”, they could ignore its crimes in the interests of seeing the capitalist enemy defeated.

You see the same pattern of lies and indulgence in the case of Hamas. Journalists  have produced a multitude of examples of fellow travelling since 7 October but let one meeting of the Oakland City Council in the Bay area of San Francisco speak for them all.

A council member wanted the council to pass a motion that condemned the killings and hostage-taking by Hamas, who, in case we forget, prompted the war that has devastated Gaza, by massacring Israeli civilians. The motion got nowhere

According to one speaker Hamas did not massacre anyone, a modern variant of Holocaust denial that is becoming endemic. “There have not been beheadings of babies and rapings,” a woman said at the meeting. “Israel murdered their own people on October 7.”  Another woman said that calling Hamas a terrorist organization is “ridiculous, racist and plays into the genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media.” Hamas was the “armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance” , said a third who clearly had no knowledge of the civil war between Hamas and Fatah.

“To condemn Hamas was very anti-Arab racist” cried a fourth. The meeting returned to modern Holocaust denial as a new speaker said the Israeli Defence Forces had murdered their own people and it was “bald propaganda” to suggest otherwise. A man intervened to shout that “to hear them complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wifebeater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back”.  

Anyone who contradicted him was a “white supremacist.”

Of course they were.

Now if theocrats were to establish an Islamist tyranny in the Bay area, I am sure every single speaker would scream their heads off, as Auden predicted. They can turn into fellow travellers as there is no more of a prospect of theocracy threatening them than there was of communism threatening readers of the left-wing press in the UK and US in the 1930s.

A serious left would have plenty to complain about. Consider the Israeli position after the breakdown of the ceasefire. The Israeli state is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a catastrophe of a prime minister, who left his people exposed to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. His war aims are contradictory: you cannot both wipe out Hamas and free the hostages.

Worst of all, the Israeli defence forces are to move to the southern Gaza strip where two million Palestinians are crammed. Just war doctrine holds that a military action must have a reasonable chance of success if the suffering is to be permitted. How, reasonably, can the Israeli army expect to find guerilla fighters hiding in a terrified population?  According to leaks in the Israeli media, Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of state, was warning the Israeli government that, “You can’t operate in southern Gaza in the way you did in the north. There are two million Palestinians there.” But he was ignored.  A radical movement worth having would surely be putting pressure on the Biden administration to force Israel to listen to its concerns.

The radical movement we have will not engage in practical politics because compromise is anathema to it. Any honest account of the war would have to admit that Israel has the right to defend itself against attack. It is just that the military position it finds itself in now may well make its war aims impossible and therefore immoral.

You can see why practical politics has no appeal. Where is the violent satisfaction in sober analysis,  the drama in compromise? Where is the Manichean distinction between the absolute good of the Palestinians and the pure evil of Israel?  

Meanwhile, ever since the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967, you have been able to say that Jewish settler sites on the West Bank were placed there deliberately to make a peace settlement impossible, and ensure that Israel controlled all the territory from “the river to the sea” forever.

A serious left might try to revive a two-state solution by building an international consensus that the settlements must go. Once again, however, that is too tame an aim. For the fellow traveller watching Palestine from a safe distance, satisfaction comes only by embracing Hamas’s call for the destruction of Israel. Some progressives try to dress up the urge to destroy by pretending that Jews and Palestinians will go on to live together in some happy-clappy, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state. But most must know they are advocating a war to the death. What makes their position so disreputable is that, if they thought about it calmly, they would know it would be a war that only Israel could win. It is the Israelis who have the nuclear weapons, after all.

The worst of the global left is dilettantish. It advocates a maximalist position which has a minimal chance of success - just for the thrill of it. David Caute, a historian of fellow travelling with Stalin and communism said that the endorsement of communism by fellow travelling intellectuals in the West “deepened the despair” of Soviet intellectuals. “In their darkest hours they heard themselves condemned by their own kind”.

The 2020s are not the 1930s. I am sure that, if I were a Palestinian in Gaza, my sole concern would be the removal of Israeli forces that threatened me and my family. I would either not care about demonstrations in the West or I would receive some comfort from the knowledge that people all over the world were protesting on my behalf.

Nevertheless, a kind of betrayal is still at work. By inflaming and amplifying the worst elements in Palestine the global left is giving comfort to the worst elements in Israel, which are equally determined to make a compromise impossible.

The New Statesman made that point well when it ran a piece by Celeste Marcus.   She came from the Zionist far right, and was taught doctrines that dehumanised Palestinians. She grew up and grew away from the prejudices of her childhood and became a liberal. But after she moved into her new world, she “recognised immediately that progressive leftists feel about Israelis the way radical Zionists feel about Palestinians: these are not real people.”

The result is that for all its power on the streets and in academia the global left is almost an irrelevance.

“To influence Israel,” she writes, “one must be willing to recognise it. Since leftist leaders cannot bother to do this, they cannot be of real use to Palestinians. This is a betrayal of their own cause.”

The dilettantism of fellow travelling always ends in betrayal and denial for the reason Auden gave: terror is always more tolerable when it happens far, far away.

[stil-lindigo]

I gave up on the idea of revolution in this country a long time ago. Queer people can't even be assed to stop eating at Chick-fil-A. 53% of white women voters voted for Trump. Americans are too dedicated to going against their own self-interest time and time again...

okay? It’s your right to take a defeatist attitude if you want to, but I’m not going to commiserate with you after Palestinians have asked for a global strike while they’re being ethnically cleansed. You can be a part of a movement, you can recognise that the genocide in Palestine is uniting people all over the world against a fascist state in ways that are unprecedented, you can look at the wave of recent wins in unionization efforts and still hold onto hope. You can also critique people’s commitment to their own comfort, understand the lies and coddling that people who live in a capitalist society grow up with. But there’s a balance.

[satellitebroadcast]

We will not forget, and we will not forgive. 16/9/1982 The 42nd anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: Telegram 42 Years Since the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, and the War of Genocide Continues

42 years have passed, and the Palestinian memory still holds the recollection of one of the most heinous crimes in modern human history. This massacre was committed by the gangs of the zionist occupation army and its collaborators in Lebanon against unarmed civilians, including Palestinian refugees, their Lebanese brothers, and dozens of others of various Arab and foreign nationalities. The massacre claimed the lives of more than 3,500 martyrs and left hundreds missing. The murderers committed the most brutal acts of killing and torture, cutting open the bellies of pregnant women, slaughtering children, women, and the elderly, and destroying homes over the heads of their inhabitants. For three consecutive days, the killers unleashed all their hatred and savagery, carrying out one of the most atrocious crimes against humanity. Its psychological impact remains present in the minds and hearts of all our Palestinian people and all the free and honorable people in the world. This horrific massacre occurred in the wake of the zionist invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the steadfastness of the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance against the invading forces at the gates of Beirut for three months. During this period, the occupation failed to break through. They managed to enter only through deceit and Western-American collusion, which provided guarantees and promises to the Palestinian revolution forces to protect Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Just days after the revolution forces departed, the Nazi gangs, under orders and support from the zionist occupation army led by war criminal Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and his Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, stormed the camp inhabited by thousands of Palestinian refugees, poor Lebanese, Syrians, and others, where they proceeded to kill every living being they came across. Despite the brutality and savagery committed by the occupation army and its tools, the world turned a blind eye to prosecuting the criminal murderers and pursuing them as war criminals. The genocide being perpetrated against our people in the Gaza Strip proves that as long as criminals remain outside prison, they continue to accumulate crime, savagery, and fascism, sitting at the top of the racist zionist entity, which today poses a threat to all humanity and to all the free and honorable people in our nation and the world. The 42nd anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the war of genocide led by the occupation army in partnership with and complicity of colonial Western American silence and official Arab betrayal against the Palestinian people continues to unfold. Today, our people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Al-Quds face a war of genocide and ethnic cleansing rarely seen in contemporary human history. The aim is to liquidate the Palestinian cause and implement the zionist-imperialist schemes to control the resources and wealth of the peoples of the region and colonial domination over the world. While the occupation army commits the most heinous crimes using the latest in American-zionist Western killing machines against an unarmed people who have only the will and faith in the justice of their cause and their right to a free and dignified life like all the peoples of the earth, the Palestinian people continue their resilience and steadfastness, writing the most wonderful epics of heroism and sacrifice, rejecting subjugation and surrender, and affirming their commitment to the option of resistance as the only path to liberation and return.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre 42 years ago served as a model and a lesson for our people and a warning to all who bet on American and Western guarantees and promises, which are synonymous with lies, hypocrisy, and conspiracy against peoples yearning for liberation from the yoke of occupation and enslavement. As we remember the horror of this massacre, we call on the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, all international legal and human rights institutions, and all advocates of freedom and justice worldwide to continue exerting pressure by all means and methods until the war of genocide against our people in Gaza and the West Bank stops. We demand the prosecution of the leaders of the zionist entity and its army and their trial as war criminals so that the murderous criminals do not escape punishment, as did the perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila massacre 42 years ago. On the anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, we renew our pledge to the martyrs of the ongoing massacre that our people will continue the path of struggle and resistance until all their usurped rights are restored, no matter how long it takes and regardless of the sacrifices made. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Central Media Department September 16, 2024

[traegorn]

Do you seriously think all insulin will be cut off from diabetics in a revolution? You are the dumbest cunt to ever put on a flat cap, which is stiff competition. Even if the revolutionaries are waging total war, they still have to manage logistics for civilians, and so a priority would be supplying their diabetic population with medicine to survive, or otherwise evacuating disabled civilians to places where medication would be available. Communists believe in universal healthcare. If "all supply chains collapsed" the war would be lost instantly. And while you're right that Americans would die, the us military would have to pull out from their bases across the world to put down a rebellion in their own country, meaning that it would kill fewer people abroad, and therefore fewer people overall in a hypothetical civil war versus their global wars on the third world. But those would be American lives so that's what makes it unconscionable for you. Diabetic Gazans are dying after a decades long blockade, diabetic Americans would have a fighting chance stockpiling insulin, evacuating, and/or doing logistics for the revolution.

I don't think you understand what societal collapse looks like, or how fragile the complex supply chain that provides for over 345 Million Americans is.

In fact, I was talking about this with your mom the other day. Your dad was hogtied in the corner with his ball gag in, so we had a minute or two while we were waiting for him to get an erection again.

Frankly, he needs to get more vitamin E in his diet -- but that's a discussion for another day.

Anyways, as she was undoing my cuffs, she mentioned that the US had seen a record high of drug shortages in 2024, including Insulin. If we consider how fragile that supply is in peace time and extrapolate even a low level disruption to something like, say, the ability to ship things across the midwest, we'd be looking at a deeply dangerous situation where the death toll would be enormous.

We would have kept talking, but your dad got hard again and my mouth was full with his balls.

Anyways, when "revolutionaries" are fighting a war, their priorities are going to be ammunition, clean clothes, and food for themselves. I'm dead in this revolution, and you don't seem to give a shit -- so explain why exactly I should take you seriously?

Also, as an aside, the people you claim you're fighting for don't even want you to withhold your vote. You're doing this for your own vanity and feelings, and not for the real lives of anyone else. Your parents and I are disappointed in you.

[her-moth]

I wrote an essay 'Stone and Seed', about starvation as a tool of the genocide in Gaza, for Vittles.

[dragoneyes618]

L.A.’s largest Jewish neighborhood was the site of an anti-Jewish riot on Sunday, as a pro-Hamas and Hezbollah mob attacked Jews and blocked access to a synagogue where an Israel real estate fair was taking place. At around 11 a.m., rioters gathered outside Adas Torah Synagogue in the Pico-Robertson area and came mask/kefiyyeh-to-face against Jews who had come to rally in support of Israel, responding to a call on social media to turn out after recent Israel real estate events in other cities, including Teaneck, NJ and Toronto, drew antisemitic hordes, and one in Brooklyn was preemptively canceled because police would not guarantee the safety of attendees.

LAPD riot police responded to the chaotic scene and eventually cleared the area in front of the synagogue. But what happened in between is drawing ire from Jewish community leaders.

Political consultant Noah Pollak posted on X that he was at the synagogue and that the LAPD “let the Hamas supporters take over the sidewalk in front of the shul and block its entrance. In fact, LAPD had formed a cordon around the front of the shul to keep Jews out and Hamas supporters in. I tried to enter with my kids through the front door and was turned away not by Hamas supporters but by the LAPD. Anyone who wanted to attend had to use a secret back entrance.”

Shouting now familiar slogans including “Long live the intifada!” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” the crowd quickly grew violent, punching and shoving and weaponizing bottles, sticks, and even their sign handles to attack Jews. Bear spray was also used, including against journalist Cam Higby, who posted videos of the attack on social media.

Police made only a single arrest – for carrying a prohibited “spiked flag.” They are reportedly investigating two allegations of battery.

Echoing coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, many news outlets framed the incident as a spontaneous “brawl,” “outbreak of violence” and “violent clash” (CNN’s take was “Violent scuffles break out between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and counter protestors in Los Angeles”) – yet this was anything but a random, unforeseen occurrence. Community activist and former Los Angeles City Council candidate Sam Yebri posted on X that “these terrorists told us when and where they were coming. For a week, we pleaded with our elected leaders to speak up. Not one made a public statement condemning these extremists.” He said elected officials “told LAPD to stand down and not intervene… Fortunately, proud Jews and well-organized Jewish groups stepped up to prevent a mass casualty event and the total destruction of the Pico-Robertson.” The Palestinian Youth Movement LA and Code Pink LA were among those behind Sunday’s riot.

“It’s like the media [are] bending over backwards to be politically correct,” the founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, told The Jewish Press. “The people that appeared at the synagogue [in Los Angeles] were radical Palestinians, Arabs, others who were there to disrupt. There are no two sides to that story. There is only one side, there are the good guys, and the other, the evil guys.”

Yebri said what occurred in front of the synagogue is “a dark stain in the history of Los Angeles. Violent extremists who proudly praise Hamas and Hezbollah marched outside an Orthodox synagogue in America’s most heavily Jewish neighborhood outside of New York – where my kids go to school, where my family worships, where my family eat and shop – and brazenly terrorized Jewish Angelenos with impunity and without any consequence. These violent masked domestic terrorists bludgeoned Jews, vandalized synagogues, schools and stores, keyed cars, assaulted anyone who appeared Jewish blocked Jews from entering their synagogue, and chanted for the genocide of the Jewish people. These violent masked domestic terrorists are now dispersing into Jewish neighborhoods hunting Jews and causing more destruction and vandalism.”

Indeed, videos of so-called “Jew-hunting” on the on the streets of L.A. that same day have circulated on social media, one showing stick-wielding thugs exiting their car to attack Jews, and another showing a mass of screaming protestors, having moved on from outside the synagogue, making their way down the block of a Jewish neighborhood threatening residents.

“Pro-Hamas and Hezbollah extremists violently attacked American Jews in Los Angeles and the politicians ordered the police to do nothing to defend them,” wrote Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Radical leftists and Islamists are ruining our country.”

Late Sunday night, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass issued statements denouncing the morning’s violence, specifically condemning the targeting of a house of worship. President Biden also issued a statement of condemnation.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, a Jewish woman and her husband were attacked and beaten at their children’s graduation at a Brooklyn elementary school last week. Members of an Arabic-speaking family at P.S. 682 in Gravesend threw the man to the ground, grabbed his legs, and kicked and punched him. To the tune of “Free Palestine!” “Gaza is Ours!” and “Death to Israel!” the man was put in a chokehold and assaulted with a sharp stiletto heel the couple alleged.

The Jewish mom and her husband, a Dominican who is Catholic, shared their story with the New York Post after police refused to classify the incident as a hate crime. The NYPD is now investigating the incident further. “They targeted my family because we are Jewish,” said the woman, whose 10-year-old twins witnessed the assault, and whose 16-year-old was punched in the face after trying to help his father. While trying to video the assault, the mother was also attacked, pulled by her hair from behind and knocked to the ground by a woman shouting, “I will kill you.”

“The other side is saying, ‘Oh, they started it,’” Hikind said. “We in the Jewish community should be very, very concerned about the future…I say that because unfortunately, there’s no leadership as far as I’m concerned. These incidents happen, there’s no plan, there’s no plan to deal with everything going on…There are so many situations that don’t even make the news, so things are even worse than what we think they are.”

In an incident which did make the news last week, a mob of teens attacked a 41-year-old hasidic man late one night in Williamsburg with traffic cones and bottles while shouting antisemitic slurs. The NYPD hate crimes task force is investigating.

As of May 21, antisemitic crimes were up 55% in New York City compared with the same time last year – amounting to 143 incidents, according to the NYPD. Nationally, the Anti-Defamation League reported a record high of 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2023 – a 140% rise over 2022 – with 5,200 of those occurring after October 7. The period of October 7 through January 7 saw a 361% rise over the previous year. Figures for 2024 are not yet available.

“There are no consequences for antisemitism,” Hikind told The Jewish Press. The message violent demonstrators get, in his words: “You’re free. Go ahead and do it tomorrow again.”

[chaiaurchaandni]

israeli military occupation and apartheid in the occupied west bank

[fordtato]

From a Palestinian - I know this is long but read it anyways:

If any leftists on this fucking site are using antisemitism to further the Free Palestine movement, you're not fucking helping. Not just because there are Jewish Palestinians. Not just because it furthers the idea that the movement is rooted in antisemitism. And not just because the people who are ultimately going to be impacted by this "activism" are Palestinian families (like my own), who will be on the receiving end of the brunt of government retaliation. It simply isn't helpful and isn't right.

Gaza is an open-air prison, cut off from food and water and medicine and fuel. Even before this recent chapter of the conflict, its people are penned in and brutalized and kidnapped and imprisoned and murdered, without any true relief, and very often without mainstream attention. This is being carried out by the government of Israel (with US government support) and its military, and it is aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, a people without any formal military or power. Palestinians in the country are being slaughtered, and Palestinians outside of the country are slowing losing their connection to their identity and homeland and need to watch as their brethren are unilaterally labeled as terrorists and "animals" and killed, raped and buried in rubble.

As a movement we need to acknowledge that Hamas is an antisemitic force. There is no justifying it or going around it. Internet leftists, you're so good at nitpicking at the past comments of online allies and finding the problematic thing someone said on twitter in 2018 and then never defending them again no matter what. But we can't do the same here with Hamas when leaders in the party are antisemitic and when people are dead? We need to defend Jewish people and that doesn't stop here. And nobody dare try to explain to me that this is what a revolution looks like. Those killed weren't all IDF soldiers. And don't explain to me that even colonization and occupation is violence (especially if you live in the US, a colonized nation stolen from indigenous people), because of course I understand that. Palestine has a right to defend itself against violence, but Hamas is explicitly antisemitic and we can't just stand against the ruthless killing of civilians only when it's Palestinian civilians.

Yes, it's complicated. YES this violence and the power vacuums that allow groups like Hamas to take power are very often the response to brutality, and a long-term symptom in the aftermath of European imperialism. We can acknowledge that and understand that and even be sympathetic to the historical context that allows this to unfold while still condemning the death of civilians. After all, being against the death of civilians is at the core of the Free Palestine movement.

Defending Jewish people does NOT mean dismissing the slaughter and literal genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Defending Jewish people does not mean defending the actions of the Israeli government. And standing with Palestine and freeing it from brutality does NOT mean ignoring that antisemitism is fraught in the world to this day. One part of why Israel is able to garner civilian support despite the atrocities of its government is because not many other countries are taking in refugees of antisemitism, and historically most countries have never protected Jewish people EVER. That is something we need to acknowledge. And acknowledging that does not mean we justify the actions of the government of Israel, and it does not mean we are turning a blind eye to the occupation or the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian civilians.

BTW, tone-policing Palestinians about how they talk about Israel while we are in mourning, and collectively witnessing the brutality our loved ones are facing, and literally watching our homeland get destroyed IS HORRIBLE. IT IS UNHELPFUL. IT IS INSENSITIVE AND TONE DEAF. Do not bring up Hamas in my fucking inbox, MY PEOPLE ARE BEING SLAUGHTERED AND LIKENED TO ANIMALS AND I AM FORCED TO WATCH.

The same applies to tone-policing Jewish people when they are getting death threats at synagogues and JCCs and/or are mourning loved ones in Israel. Yelling "but what about Palestine" whenever a Jewish person in America (who has literally nothing to do with the heinous acts of a foreign government entity) mentions they are grieving or afraid or getting death threats doesn't fucking do anything. This isn't activism.

We are all tired. We are all traumatized. We will feel this for generations.

[bouncinghedgehog]

"Many have passed away, and those who are still here are called

"the elderly.""

We were born in the 40s-50s-60s.

We grew up in the 50's-60's-70's

We studied in the 60s-70s-80s.

We were together in the 70s-80s-90s.

We got married or not and discovered the world in the 70s-80s-90s.

Adventuring into the 80s - 90s

We're settling in to the 2000s.

We became wiser in 2010s.

And we’re going strong into 2020 and beyond.

Turns out we went through EIGHT different decades...

TWO different centuries...

TWO different millennials...

We've gone from phone with operator for long distance calls, pay booths, video calls worldwide.

We’ve gone from slides to YouTube, vinyls to online music, handwritten letters to emails and Whats App.

Live games on the radio, black and white TV, color TV, then HD 3D TV.

We went to the video store and now watching Netflix.

We've known the first computers, punch cards, disks and now we have gigabytes and megabytes on our smartphones.

We wore shorts all through our childhood, then trousers, ep pants or mini-skirts, Oxfords, Clarks, Palestinian scarves, jumpsuits, and blue jeans.

We avoided childhood paralysis, meningitis, poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, swine flu and now COVID-19.

We've done roller skating, roller skating, tricycle, bicycle, moped, gasoline or diesel and now we drive hybrids or electric.

We played with the little ones

horses and checkers, ostrich and marbles, 1000 threshold and monopoly, now there's candy crush on our smartphones

And we read... much

And our schoolmates religion was not a subject...

We used to drink tap water and lemonade in glass bottles, and the vegetables on our plate were always fresh, today we get meals delivered

Yes, we have been through a lot but what a beautiful life we have had!

They might describe us as “ex-annuals”; people who were born in this 50s world, who had an analog childhood and digital adulthood.

We should add the Biological Revolution that we have witnessed. In 1960, biology was very descriptve. We have witnessed the event of Molecular Biology: the molecules of Life have been discovered: DNA, RNA etc. When you see everything that has come from it: gene therapy, gene fingerprints, and others the progress is considerable.

We kind of have "seen it all"!

Our generation has literally lived and witnessed more than any other in every dimension of life.

This is our generation that has literally adapted to "CHANGE".

A big congratulations to all the members of a very special generation, which will be UNIQUE.. "